The Filter Bubble: How Did You Get Here?

Once in a while I catch a glimpse of someone else's Facebook News Feed page and I am always surprised to see the content. Based on the fact that I regularly write about social justice issues on this blog it won't come as a surprise that I use Facebook to gather and disseminate politically relevant stories and information. Thus, my News Feed is full of political links. I easily forget that the internet experiences of other people are often very different from my own. The daily images and info that people find in their Facebook account will reflect their interests and activities and those of their network - which may not include feminist theory, political activism and world news.

Despite knowing that Facebook was tailoring its content to the individuals, I assumed that to some extent this practice was limited to advertising and news preferences. A Democracy Now interview with Eli Pariser about his new book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You, disrupted my view of how individual internet experiences differ. It also caused me to question how useful my attempts to "protect" myself were. I use an advertisement blocking application which helps filter out most of the crap companies are trying to use to sell things to me.

But I hadn't been aware of the extent of the internet filters and the virtual bubble that I could be in. After watching the interview with Pariser, I reflected on a recent experience doing research for this blog. I was trying to search for information on climate change deniers for a post and my Google searches were fruitless. Why wasn't I able to find information that conflicted with my beliefs? Google was likely trying to appease me and give me what I wanted to see.

Here is a TED Talk given by Pariser:

Pariser gives the example of doing a Google search with keywords such as "Egypt" and the different results one might get. On the Filter Bubble website, they also offer several examples. I decided to try this out myself:

This example leads me to why I think the filter bubble is dangerous for social justice oriented people and the people that tag their tweets with #p2 and #p2ca. The filter bubble is very divisive and results in people only accessing information that fits with their worldview. Without an understanding of what diverse groups of people are posting, tweeting, and blogging about, we will have a more difficult time communicating, cooperating and collaborating. And ultimately, I think that working together is the only thing that will move people forward.

Whether or not you are concerned about the social implications of the filter bubble, you are probably worried about how it might affect you personally. Well, you can "pop your filter bubble" using the clear instructions list 10 Things You Can Do from The Filter Bubble website.

Finally, take a moment to think: How did you get to this website? Let me know in the comments!

Not Feminist, eh?

There are many words I consider part of my identity, including feminist. It is a very loaded term. Since I was a young girl I knew that I was all for equal rights, but I shied away from being called a feminist, as many girls do, because of the stereotypes associated with the word. In this post I'm going to write about being called a feminist, denying you're a feminist, and introduce the website Not Feminist, eh?

Only in university did I embrace the term feminism (with its multiple and fluid definitions). In a Media and Feminist Studies course we started the semester with a whirlwind reading of Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media by Susan Douglas. The whole book is a great read and especially relevant to anyone who was a girl in Canada or the US anytime in the second half of the 20^th century.

Chapter 12, titled "I’m not a Feminist, but…", resonated with me because only a couple of years before reading this I was definitely making statements about equality that began with that expression. The chapter discusses why women in younger generations have tended to distance themselves from the term. Often, women don't understand its meaning or don't want to be labelled as a feminist because of the negative connotations and the stereotypes associated with feminism. In class we addressed media representations of feminism as everything from dangerous to dead, and the myths that feminism is no longer needed, either because of its failure or because of its success.

Post-feminist theories help us understand how feminism is perceived in the Global North. In her book Gender and the Media, Rosalind Gill writes:

I want to argue that postfeminism [sic] is best understood not as an epistemological perspective, nor as a historical shift, and not (simply) as a backlash, in which its meanings are pre-specified. Rather, postfeminism should be conceived of as a sensibility, and postfeminist media culture should be our critical object the phenomenon which analysts must inquire into and interrogate. This approach does not require a static notion of authentic feminism as a comparison point, but instead is informed by postmodernist and constructionist perspectives and seeks to examine what is distinctive about contemporary articulations of gender in the media (254-255)

Post-feminism should be conceived as a sensibility… Today’s media culture has a distinctive postfeminist sensibility organized around choice, empowerment, self-surveillance, and sexual difference, and articulated in an ironic and knowing register in which feminism is simultaneously taken for granted and repudiated (271).

In her article "Post-feminism and Popular Culture", Angela McRobbie writes:

Post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasize that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force (215).

A couple of weeks ago I came across the website www.notracistbut.com, a recent project that makes racism more visible and calls into question whether we live in a post-racial society. www.whitewhine.com, another site with a somewhat problematic name, but similar purpose, calls attention to so-called “first world problems” – essentially problems that aren’t serious and generally only afflict affluent people in the Global North.

I read about the source of Not Racist, But… content and discovered OpenBook. Curious, I typed “feminism,” “feminists,” and “not feminist but” into the search engine, and Not Feminist, eh? was born.

The website highlights status updates that use “I’m not a feminist, but” to express a feminist perspective while avoiding the feminist label. It also compiles statements that express negative sentiments towards feminism, blame feminists for  specific or general problems in the world, or perpetuate stereotypes about feminists.

 

Stereotypes about feminists are problematic because they erase the differences of a diverse group of women. Furthermore, it's problematic to view all of these stereotypes as negative – is being masculine, pro-choice, or not shaving your legs a bad thing? No, of course not. So let's just keep that in mind.

There is a joke about feminists changing light bulbs that apparently went viral recently. The punch line varies but mostly claims that feminists “can’t change anything.”

This "answer" intrigues me because it hints that feminism is indeed relevant and needed, but that there is resistance to equality and change, and therefore attempts to ridicule feminists for (and discourage them from) trying to change the status quo. Post-feminism, anyone?

Not Feminist, eh?